Thursday, May 25, 2017

Friday Thinking 26 May 2017

Hello all – Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.

Cities are machines, the largest things we build. Their airports and seaports digest and expel people and goods, while their roads and rails siphon both through the urban landscape. Their tunnels carry data, power, water, and sewage. Their governing authorities work (one hopes) with deliberateness, imposing coherence on what otherwise could be chaos. It can all hum efficiently—or fail spectacularly. Typically, all of this is constructed over centuries. The Parisian sewer system dates to the 1850s; New York’s first subway line opened in 1904; London got its first central power station in 1891. Avenues follow cow paths; creeks become water tunnels; fiber-optic lines slowly take their place beside electric cables. The lesson of city building is that infrastructure takes forever—the tortoise to technology’s hare. But Dubai has done it differently. Dubai has built in 50 years what has taken most cities 100.

For the next generation, Dubai’s advantages are more fraught, tied as they are to impending climate catastrophe. Many cities are about to face new extremes of temperature and drought. Dubai already does. Many cities will struggle to find fresh water and clean power. Dubai already does. Viewed in this light, Dubai is a place where the future has arrived early.

Rather than be intimidated by its ­potentially catastrophic challenges, withdrawing from the world and doubling down on outdated technologies, Dubai is accelerating toward it. The plan is simple: Turn the traditional mechanisms of urban life into a platform for confronting the hazards of contemporary society. Then export those innovations. If a city is a machine, Dubai wants to be the most advanced city-­machine the world has ever seen—and it wants to sell its blueprints to everyone. “Dubai is recognizing that climate change is an existential threat to its ability to be a prosperous part of the world,” says David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group.

In this imagined Dubai of the future, the electricity and water authority has blown past today’s supersize desalination plant and opened a bio-desalination plant, grown from the genes of a jellyfish (the “most absorptive natural material”) and a mangrove tree (“one of nature’s best desalinators”). And it sold them too: “We also export jellyfish bio-desalination plants to cities across the world,” the stentorian voice continues. Robots construct buildings from sand. An artificial intelligence selects and grows food in indoor farms. And flying cars pulse through traffic-free streets. It’s all presented with enough science-fiction flair to maintain a sense of humor. But the punchline is serious: “We solved our own problems, and now climate solutions are our greatest export.” At a historical moment when—in the United States, at least—global-warming predictions remain politically ­controversial, it is startling to see Dubai planning its ­economic future around these challenges.

“Because we don’t have, we need to think harder,” Al Gergawi says, tacitly acknowledging that the pieces of the puzzle don’t yet fit together. “We need to think faster, and we need to reinvent every single product.

We are on the cusp of one of the fastest, deepest, most consequential disruptions of transportation in history. By 2030, within 10 years of regulatory approval of autonomous vehicles (AVs), 95% of U.S. passenger miles traveled will be served by on-demand autonomous electric vehicles owned by fleets, not individuals, in a new business model we call “transportas-a-service” (TaaS). The TaaS disruption will have enormous implications across the transportation and oil industries, decimating entire portions of their value chains, causing oil demand and prices to plummet, and destroying trillions of dollars in investor value — but also creating trillions of dollars in new business opportunities, consumer surplus and GDP growth.

The disruption will be driven by economics. Using TaaS, the average American family will save more than $5,600 per year in transportation costs, equivalent to a wage raise of 10%. This will keep an additional $1 trillion per year in Americans’ pockets by 2030, potentially generating the largest infusion of consumer spending in history

Disruption of Transportation & Collapse of the Internal-Combustion Vehicle and Oil Industries

For the last five years, Apple held on to the title of the world’s most valuable brand. Then this year, the iPhone maker lost the top spot to Google, according to consultancy Brand Finance’s Global 500 rankings.

But the hard problem is getting databases working together, invisibly, for our benefit, or getting the databases to interact smoothly with processes running on our own laptops.

Those technical problems are usually masked by bureaucracy, but we experience their impact every single day of our lives. It’s the devil’s own job getting two large organizations working together on your behalf, and deep down, that’s a software issue. Perhaps you want your car insurance company to get access to a police report about your car getting broken into. In all probability you will have to get the data out of one database in the form of a handful of printouts, and then mail them to the company yourself: there’s no real connectivity in the systems. You can’t drive the process from your laptop, except by the dumb process of filling in forms. There’s no sense of using real computers to do things, only computers abused as expensive paper simulators. Although in theory information could just flow from one database to another with your permission, in practice the technical costs of connecting databases are huge, and your computer doesn’t store your data so it can do all this work for you. Instead it’s just something you fill in forms on. Why are we under-utilizing all this potential so badly?

The human factors — the mindsets which generate the software — don’t fit together. Each enterprise builds their computer system in their own image, and these images disagree about what is vital and what is incidental, and truth does not flow between them easily.

Over and over again, we go back to paper and metaphors from the age of paper because we cannot get the software right, and the core to that problem is that we managed to network the computers in the 1990s, but we never did figure out how to really network the databases and get them all working together.

Imagine how much WikiPedia would suck by now if it was a start up pushing hard to monetize its user base and make its investors their money back.

This is a longish read - but an article by a physicist & psychiatrist about time and the future - just got my curiosity - this is part of a growing cloud of weak signals about fundamentally new understandings of reality arising from development of a wide range of sciences. However, in this interesting account there may be a flaw about the pre-determinability of the state space and the how entities interact with their on environments - such that actions can change the conditions of the next action. Also the assumptions of probability become more tenuous when systems can enact unpredictable, unknowable ‘adjacent possibles’. A key challenge is the interaction of knowledge gained from systems contained in the lab - versus realities with unknowable boundaries.

The special trick of consciousness is being able to project action and time into a range of possible futures

I have a confession. As a physicist and psychiatrist, I find it difficult to engage with conversations about consciousness. My biggest gripe is that the philosophers and cognitive scientists who tend to pose the questions often assume that the mind is a thing, whose existence can be identified by the attributes it has or the purposes it fulfils.

But in physics, it’s dangerous to assume that things ‘exist’ in any conventional sense. Instead, the deeper question is: what sorts of processes give rise to the notion (or illusion) that something exists? For example, Isaac Newton explained the physical world in terms of massive bodies that respond to forces. However, with the advent of quantum physics, the real question turned out to be the very nature and meaning of the measurements upon which the notions of mass and force depend – a question that’s still debated today.

As a consequence, I’m compelled to treat consciousness as a process to be understood, not as a thing to be defined. Simply put, my argument is that consciousness is nothing more and nothing less than a natural process such as evolution or the weather. My favourite trick to illustrate the notion of consciousness as a process is to replace the word ‘consciousness’ with ‘evolution’ – and see if the question still makes sense. For example, the question What is consciousness for? becomes What is evolution for? Scientifically speaking, of course, we know that evolution is not for anything. It doesn’t perform a function or have reasons for doing what it does – it’s an unfolding process that can be understood only on its own terms. Since we are all the product of

This is one more signal of an accelerating phase transition in global energy geopolitics.

The government of Indian state Gujarat has cancelled a proposed 4 gigawatt coal power ultra-mega power project due to existing surplus generation capacity and a desire to transition from fossil fuel–based energy sources to renewable power.

Reports from India’s Business Standard earlier this month reported that the government of Gujarat, under Chief Minister Vijay Rupani, has cancelled a proposal for creating a new 4,000 megawatt (MW) ultra mega coal power project that was to be developed by the Gujarat State Electricity Corporation. Specifically, the reasoning given for cancelling the project was the already substantial installed capacity — around 30,000 MW — of old and renewable energy in the state, with the government adding that building a new conventional coal power plant simply did not make sense.

The move falls well in line with moves across India to decrease its reliance upon coal, and further gives lie to claims from Australian politicians that India is in desperate need of more coal.

Only a few weeks ago it was reported that India had installed more renewable energy capacity over the last financial year than it did thermal power capacity, an impressive achievement for a country which is technically an emerging economy, and one with a massive population.

India is primarily focusing on installing massive amounts of solar power, and a report from November last year outlined how India is planning to build 1 terawatt of solar power — which sounds absurd, but given the amount of solar India has already installed, might not seem as insane as at first reading. Further, India-based consultancy Mercom Capital predicts that 10 GW of new solar capacity will be installed in India in 2017 alone.

Further, the sheer number of planned coal plants are also experiencing decline in India. In August of last year, a report published by the Institute for Energy Economics & Financial Analysis (IEEFA) showed that the country was intending to move forward on developing several coal-fired ultra mega power plants, despite the fact that it was unlikely that India actually needed any more capacity.

Fast forward to March of this year and a new report showed that the total number of coal plants globally under development plummeted in 2016, with at least 68 GW of coal construction frozen at over 100 project sites in China and India alone. It appears that a Greenpeace report that 94% of India’s planned coal capacity would be lying idle in 2022 might have got through to some of India’s leaders.

The phase transition in energy geopolitics seems to accelerate every day.

UK cements its position as global leader in wind technology as increasing scale drives down costs

The planet’s biggest and most powerful wind turbines have begun generating electricity off the Liverpool coast, cementing Britain’s reputation as a world leader in the technology.

Danish company Dong Energy has just finished installing 32 turbines in Liverpool Bay that are taller than the Gherkin skyscraper, with blades longer than nine London buses. Dong Energy, the windfarm’s developer, believes these machines herald the future for offshore wind power: bigger, better and, most importantly, cheaper.

Each of the 195m-tall turbines in the Burbo Bank extension has more than twice the power capacity of those in the neighbouring Burbo Bank windfarm completed a decade ago. “That shows you something about the scale-up of the industry, the scale-up of the technology,” said Benjamin Sykes, the country manager for Dong Energy UK.

Collectively they now have a capacity of 5.3GW, generating enough electricity to power 4.3m homes. Eight further projects already under construction will add more than half that capacity again.

It is very possible that we are in the beginning of a Cyber Global War I - this one is much more truly Global in that the variety of participants go far beyond Nation States and include a full range of interest groups, criminal organizations and individuals.

Here’s just one recent ‘engagement’ in the war. Of course the recent massive ‘ransomeware’ attacks are another signal of engagements to come.

Last week’s massive hack of the Macron campaign and the sharing of alleged documents using #MacronLeaks on social media gave supporters the chills. Right-wing activists and autonomous bots swarmed Facebook and Twitter with leaked information that was mixed with falsified reports, to build a narrative that Macron was a fraud and hypocrite.

My colleagues at the Oxford Internet Institute and I have conducted an in-depth analysis of the impact of #MacronLeaks. Our research shows that 50 percent of the Twitter content was generated by just three percent of accounts with an average of 1,500 unique tweets per hour and 9,500 retweets of these tweets per hour. We estimate that over 22.8 million Twitter users were exposed to this information every hour on election day.

This is a fascinating study that signal the link between brain functioning and particular languages. What other aspects of cognitive capacity - and reality are affected by particular languages? If you haven’t seen the movie ‘Arrival’ - it worth the view.

"In this sense, we may regard dyslexia in Chinese and English as two different brain disorders," Dr. Tan said, "because completely different brain regions are disrupted. It's very likely that a person who is dyslexic in Chinese would not be dyslexic in English."

The new research suggests .... The schooling required to read English or Chinese may fine-tune neural circuits in distinctive ways.

In ways that ancient scribes never imagined, text has transformed us. Every brain shaped by reading, whether it is schooled in Chinese or English text, measurably differs -- in terms of patterns of energy use and brain structure -- from one that has never mastered the written word, comparative brain-imaging studies show. "There are real differences that emerge because of literacy," Dr. Wolf said.

For generations, scholars have debated whether language constrains the ways we think. Now, neuroscientists studying reading disorders have begun to wonder whether the actual character of the text itself may shape the brain.

Studies of schoolchildren who read in varying alphabets and characters suggest that those who are dyslexic in one language, say Chinese or English, may not be in another, such as Italian.

Dyslexia, in which the mind scrambles letters or stumbles over text, is twice as prevalent in the U.S., where it affects about 10 million children, as in Italy, where the written word more closely corresponds to its spoken sound. "Dyslexia exists only because we invented reading," said Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

Among children raised to read and write Chinese, the demands of reading draw on parts of the brain untouched by the English alphabet, new neuroimaging studies reveal. It's the same with dyslexia, psychologist Li Hai Tan at Hong Kong Research University and his colleagues reported last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The problems occur in areas not involved in reading other alphabets.

Some social psychologists speculate that the brain changes caused by literacy could be involved in cultural differences in memory, attention and visual perception. In January's Psychological Science, MIT researchers reported that European-Americans and students from several East Asian cultures, for example, showed different patterns of brain activation when making snap judgments about visual patterns.

No one knows which came first: habits of thought or the writing system that gave them tangible form. A writing system could be drawn from the archaeology of the mind, perpetuating aspects of mental life conceived at the dawn of civilization.

And it seems the therapeutic use of language in clinical settings can also have significant impact on brain structures.

A new study from King's College London and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust has shown for the first time that cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) strengthens specific connections in the brains of people with psychosis, and that these stronger connections are associated with long-term reduction in symptoms and recovery eight years later.

CBT - a specific type of talking therapy - involves people changing the way they think about and respond to their thoughts and experiences. For individuals experiencing psychotic symptoms, common in schizophrenia and a number of other psychiatric disorders, the therapy involves learning to think differently about unusual experiences, such as distressing beliefs that others are out to get them. CBT also involves developing strategies to reduce distress and improve wellbeing.

The findings, published in the journal Translational Psychiatry, follow the same researchers' previous work which showed that people with psychosis who received CBT displayed strengthened connections between key regions of the brain involved in processing social threat accurately.

The new results show for the first time that these changes continue to have an impact years later on people's long-term recovery.

Here is a very significant signal about the profound power of framing not just for structuring reasoning - but for enabling a cognitive capacity.

Women underperform on spatial tests when they don't expect to do as well as men, but framing the tests as social tasks eliminates the gender gap in performance, according to new findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The results show that women performed just as well as their male peers when the spatial tests included human-like figures.

"Our research suggests that we may be underestimating the abilities of women in how we measure spatial thinking," says postdoctoral researcher Margaret Tarampi of the University of California, Santa Barbara. "Given findings that entry into and retention in STEM disciplines is affected by our measures of spatial ability, we may be disproportionately limiting the accessibility of these fields to women because of the ways that we are measuring spatial abilities."

Previous work on spatial thinking has provided some evidence that men are, on average, better than women at certain spatial tasks, such as imagining what an object would look like if it were rotated a specific way. But Tarampi and colleagues Nahal Heydari, a former UCSB undergraduate student, and Mary Hegarty, professor of psychological and brain sciences at UCSB, noticed that little research had investigated whether gender differences exist when it comes to spatial perspective-taking. The researchers were intrigued because being able to imagine objects and environments from another perspective is an ability that we use every day, in tasks such as reading maps, giving directions, and playing video games.

Although the existing gender stereotype about spatial ability suggested that men might be better at spatial perspective-taking than women, Tarampi and colleagues noted that the skill could also be thought of as a test of social ability or empathy, which women are typically thought to be better at.

The re-imagining of everything - has to seriously include our urban environment - we need to re-architect this environment in a way that doesn’t privilege-depend on our current concepts of the car as personal transportation environment.

Planners are anxious about automated vehicles and their potential to reshape development patterns and the urban landscape

The futuristic vision offered by automated vehicles—the freedom to be active during your commute instead of wasting away behind the wheel while stuck in traffic—isn’t quite as utopian a scenario when you run it past cautious and concerned city planners.

Ask Don Elliott, a zoning consultant and director at Clarion Associates in Denver, and he’ll tell you the idea of empty cars congesting city streets and mobile offices zipping around main roads can become downright dystopian.

“I’ve seen the blood run out of people’s faces,” he says when talking about the impact of automated vehicles on transportation, land use, and real estate. “For years, planners have been fighting for a 1 or 2 percent change in transportation mode [getting more people to use transit or bike instead of drive]. With this technology, everything goes out the window. It’s a nightmare.”

The much-hyped transition to autonomous cars, while still years, or even decades, away, according to experts, is an opportunity and challenge that has wide potential to reshape our transportation systems.

But many believe that as city planners, transportation officials, and, eventually, developers start grappling with the changes to come, autonomous vehicles’ potential to reshape real estate, development, and city planning will rival that of the introduction of the automobile. At the American Planning Association’s annual conference earlier this month in New York City, the issue of autonomous vehicles and driverless cars, one admittedly far in the future, was the subject of numerous present-day panels, discussions, and debates.

Here’s a great signal about possible ways to broaden the competition for the delivery of Internet services. Despite the headline being somewhat ‘grammar free’. :)

“Tens of thousands” of Peruvians have been getting online using Project Loon, the ambitious connectivity project from Google's parent company, Alphabet.

Project Loon uses tennis court-sized balloons carrying a small box of equipment to beam internet access to a wide area below.

The team told the BBC they had been testing the system in Peru when serious floods hit in January, and so the technology was opened up to people living in three badly-hit cities.

Until now, only small-scale tests of the technology had taken place.

Project Loon is in competition with other attempts to provide internet from the skies, including Facebook’s Aquila project which is being worked on in the UK.

Here’s another signal about continued developments in the computational world - file under ‘Moore’s Law is Dead - Long Live Moore’s Law’. HP discovered the memrister almost a decade ago - it is very possible that they have integrated that technology in their ‘memory driven computer’.

Prototype from The Machine research project upends 60 years of innovation and demonstrates the potential for Memory-Driven Computing

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) today introduced the world’s largest single-memory computer, the latest milestone in The Machine research project (The Machine). The Machine, which is the largest R&D program in the history of the company, is aimed at delivering a new paradigm called Memory-Driven Computing—an architecture custom-built for the big data era.

The prototype unveiled today contains 160 terabytes (TB) of memory, capable of simultaneously working with the data held in every book in the Library of Congress five times over—or approximately 160 million books. It has never been possible to hold and manipulate whole data sets of this size in a single-memory system, and this is just a glimpse of the immense potential of Memory-Driven Computing

Based on the current prototype, HPE expects the architecture could easily scale to an exabyte-scale single-memory system and, beyond that, to a nearly-limitless pool of memory—4,096 yottabytes. For context, that is 250,000 times the entire digital universe today.

With that amount of memory, it will be possible to simultaneously work with every digital health record of every person on earth; every piece of data from Facebook; every trip of Google’s autonomous vehicles and every data set from space exploration all at the same time—getting to answers and uncovering new opportunities at unprecedented speeds.

This may be old news by now - but it is definitely another signal related to the domestication of DNA and a whole host of other implications.

“Our hope is that one day this ovarian bioprosthesis is really the ovary of the future,” said Teresa Woodruff at Northwestern University in Chicago. “The goal of the project is to be able to restore fertility and endocrine health to young cancer patients who have been sterilised by their cancer treatment.”

The creation of artificial ovaries for humans is a step closer after birth of healthy pups from mice given ‘ovarian bioprosthesis’

Infertile mice have given birth to healthy pups after having their fertility restored with ovary implants made with a 3D printer.

Researchers created the synthetic ovaries by printing porous scaffolds from a gelatin ink and filling them with follicles, the tiny, fluid-holding sacs that contain immature egg cells.

In tests on mice that had one ovary surgically removed, scientists found that the implants hooked up to the blood supply within a week and went on to release eggs naturally through the pores built into the gelatin structures.

The work marks a step towards making artificial ovaries for young women whose reproductive systems have been damaged by cancer treatments, leaving them infertile or with hormone imbalances that require them to take regular hormone-boosting drugs.

We are barely even at the threshold of the era of domesticated DNA - this is an excellent signal of the trajectory of where we are going - whether you agree or not - the 21st century - is a whole new world.

A group of scientists is pushing ahead with plans to build whole genomes—including human ones—from scratch.

Since the Human Genome Project (HGP) was completed in 2003, scientists have sequenced the full genomes of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of species. Octopuses. Barley. Mosquitoes. Birch trees. Reading genomes is now commonplace, but that’s not enough for the group of scientists who gathered at the New York Genome Center on Tuesday. They want to write entire genomes with the same ease, synthesizing them from scratch and implanting them into hollow cells.

One team already did this for a tiny bacterium in 2010, creating a synthetic cell called Synthia. But the New York group has set its sights on building the considerably larger genomes of plants, animals, and yes—after a lot of future discussion—humans.

For now, that’s technically implausible. You’d have to make millions of short stretches of DNA, assemble them into larger structures, get them into an empty cell, and wrap and fold them correctly. In the process, you’d go bankrupt. Although we can sequence a human genome for less than $1,000, writing all 3 billion letters would still cost around $30 million. Still, even that exorbitant price has fallen from $12 billion in 2003, and should reach $100,000 within the next 20 years. And the group assembled in New York wants to double that pace.

They’re pushing for an international project called Genome Project-write—GP-write—that aims to reduce the costs of building large genomes by 1,000 times within 10 years. “It’s an aggressive goal, but based on what we saw with the HGP—the reading project, if you will—we think we can do this,” said Jef Boeke from New York University School of Medicine. And just as the HGP helped to drive down the cost of DNA-sequencing, the GP-write team hopes that the demand created by their initiative will push down the cost of DNA-writing tech. “I want to see a time in the not-too-distant future when, in elementary schools, it’ll be routine to think: I want to do some DNA synthesis as a project,” said Pamela Silver from Harvard Medical School.

There’s other consequences to ability to ‘read’ a genome - one of which is a new understanding of what a species is - and the more fluid nature of genes within the gene pool.

As DNA techniques let us see animals in finer and finer gradients, the old definition is falling apart

For Charles Darwin, "species" was an undefinable term, "one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other." That hasn't stopped scientists in the 150 years since then from trying, however. When scientists today sit down to study a new form of life, they apply any number of more than 70 definitions of what constitutes a species—and each helps get at a different aspect of what makes organisms distinct.

In a way, this plethora of definitions helps prove Darwin’s point: The idea of a species is ultimately a human construct. With advancing DNA technology, scientists are now able to draw finer and finer lines between what they consider species by looking at the genetic code that defines them. How scientists choose to draw that line depends on whether their subject is an animal or plant; the tools available; and the scientist’s own preference and expertise.

Now, as new species are discovered and old ones thrown out, researchers want to know: How do we define a species today? Let’s look back at the evolution of the concept and how far it’s come.

These advances have also renewed debates about what it means to be a species, as ecologists and conservationists discover that many species that once appeared singular are actually multitudes. Smithsonian entomologist John Burns has used DNA technology to distinguish a number of so-called "cryptic species"—organisms that appear physically identical to a members of a certain species, but have significantly different genomes. In a 2004 study, he was able to determine that a species of tropical butterfly identified in 1775 actually encompassed 10 separate species.

For Fun

For anyone who has thought about the paradox of time travel an inadvertently enacting you own demise - This is a perfect 3 minute Video.

The ‘grandfather paradox’ has long been one of the most popular thought experiments in physics: you travel back in time and murder your grandfather before he’s ever born. If you’ve killed your grandfather, you’ve prevented your own existence, but if you never existed, how could you have committed the murder in the first place? Some physicists have avoided the question by arguing that backwards time travel simply isn’t consistent with the laws of physics, or by asserting a ‘many worlds’ interpretation of the Universe. But could the concept of quantum superposition remove what seems so paradoxical from this tale of time travel and murder once and for all?